Maui supercomputing center gets huge boost and stimulus $ for photovoltaic research and development

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By HARRY EAGAR
The Maui News

KIHEI, Maui - The Maui High Performance Computing Center got more Mana on Friday - that's the name of its new platform, a giant parallel processing machine that requires $350,000 worth of electricity a month to keep it humming.

Mana is a Dell PowerEdge M610 with 1,152 nodes. Each node contains two 2.8 Ghz Intel Nehalem processors with 24 GB RAM for a total of 9,216 computer cores. That gives it a performance of 103 TeraFLOPS per second.

The computer is used for research in computing, communications and computational modeling. Users can access the machine from distant locations, but many of them come to Maui because the center itself has graphical capacities that cannot be used remotely, Bal said.

The power-hungry machines will soon get some juice of their own. The computing center will add a photovoltaic research and development component.

The Kihei R&T Park is one of the best places in the world to put a photovoltaic panel. Even before the Maui Research & Technology Center was built, the hillside was used by researchers at the University of California at Davis to test a flexible photovoltaic system, called PV-USA. Engineers were surprised when they turned it on because it put out much more electricity than they had calculated.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090823/BREAKING01/308230036/0/BREAKING02/Maui-supercomputing-center-gets-huge-boost

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1. wish it could figure out a way to get us health care - but I guess that is easy - vote Democratic

The $350,000 per month of electricity is almost unfathomable. wow